When I consider what my motive is for caring about this like I do, I see that it is the confluence of a few tendencies in my personality.

1. Open source and the open source spirit. Ever since I found a red hat disk as a child back in the 90s the communal nature of the open source software movement was appealing to me.

2. The community based nature of it. For many years I've been watching the profit motive turn rotten all the things I enjoy about browsing the internet. There is no corporate entity here. There's just us.

3. Probably most of all, and is perhaps a bit nationalistic of me, but I was always bothered that the main hubs of talking about Canadian issues exist on American websites. Our data, subject to their data privacy laws, the profit going to American corporations. Here I see an opportunity to build a hub for Canadians to discuss Canadian issues on a platform that is run by and for the benefit of Canadians. Of course, people want to consume content from other parts of the world, and I think the federation model allows us to eat our cake and have it too, we have this little slice of Lemmy to serve Canadians primarily, while still having access to the world.